Adding entries in Wikipedia that describe your agency or services is a grand idea.
Foolish me. I thought Wikipedia was a free-for-all, wild-wild-west, kinda web site. Got something to post? No problem, this ain’t your momma’s Brittanica, just throw it on up there.
Last week, the creator of the Animal Science Image Gallery asked me to post an article that would wax fondly about the image database we host at the National Agricultural Library.
To my surprise, my post was immediately flagged by the CorenSearchBot.
It seems to prevent copyright violation, Wikipedia routinely scans referenced sites and compares the text on that site with the text you’ve entered in your article. Too many similarities and you slip into the ‘speedy deletion’ bin.
This hurdle was overcome by placing a ‘public domain’ template at the top of the page, but ‘speedy deletion’ reared its gorgon head again under the ‘notability’ clause.
A human administrator,
Ziggy Sawdust, questioned the quality of the resource and, within minutes, the article was again deleted.
Thankfully, a savior, dressed in librarians clothes read the post and suggested the fix:
David Goodman said,
‘I think the speedy tag was wrong, but there was no real point in asking for reversal now, because the article would probably need some improvements to be actually acceptable. What you need is references to it from third party published reliable sources, print or online, but not blogs .And emphasise that it’s peer reviewed, and name the ed in chief. DGG (talk)
The back-and-forth between admins, content providers, and supporters is, not surprisingly, done through a wild-wild-west, free-for-all wiki 😉
Here’s my talk page
John: I’ve always wondered how it actually worked if you wanted to make a new page on Wikipedia, but didn’t actually have anything to make a page about. Thanks for the vicarious experience!
We also have had trouble trying to post information to the city of LaSalle’s wiki page. For some reason we are the only city in our area that has had Wikipedia flag our site as needing resources. I provided some references, but those must not be good enough because the information is still flagged. Also, we posted valid information and they took it down saying something like, the person posting knew too much and must be an insider. I took it that they don’t want anyone posting who actually knows the factual information about a topic. While our neighboring city has been left alone and had people add all sorts of information and photos with no editing or comments at all. I never have been able to figure out how they manage it.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Although the concept of Wikipedia is great, academically I can’t use. My Professors do not consider a scholarly resource.